Film

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel We let millions of the furry little creatures into our homes, and the internet adores them. Yet put a cat next to a dog on screen and suddenly they become the villain. That’s certainly how Jerry Hickfang sees it in Marjane Satrapi’s unevenly energetic black comedy. Prone to conversations with imaginary voices, his friendly dog Bosco gees him up while cat Mr. Whiskers urges killing sprees in a Scottish accent. The Voices certainly does its own...

By Ellery Nick The jibes had already been circulating that after resurrecting Liam Neeson for 2008’s Taken, director Pierre Morel was once again embroiled in the dark arts - having dug up a new middle-aged cadaver to be put to good use in the bone-crunching world of international espionage and quickly assembled guns. The other question was how would a political animal such a Sean Penn fair in the physically precarious world of an action thriller? We need not have...

 By Stephen Mayne @finalreel  finalreel.co.uk Come on people, by now it must be clear that threatening Liam Neeson’s fictional family cannot end well. For Neeson - part-time actor, full-time avenger - does not take kindly to guns pointed in the general direction of his children. Or knives, blunt instruments, mean words and angry looks. Teaming up with director Jaume Collet-Serra for the third time (Unknown & Non-Stop) on Run All Night, his decrepit hitman cleaves dogmatically to cliché in a...

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle Who knew a film about maths could be so entertaining? Inspired by his 2007 documentary Beautiful Young Minds director Morgan Matthews and writer James Graham’s X + Y is a very funny, sweet yet unsentimental drama centred on the surprisingly fascinating, (and hardcore), world of a Mathematics Olympiad. As “geek-cool” continues to spread X + Y is a bracingly realistic portrait of what it’s genuinely like to be on the outside. Asa Butterfiled is spot on...

By Sam Inglis  @24fpsUK  24fps.org.uk Catch Me Daddy begins slowly, drawing a portrait of separate lives, all of which seem to be lived on the margins of society. As the first half hour runs on we see that we're following two sides of a story; a criminal gang and the two teenagers they are looking for. Initially I assumed that what had got Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) and Aaron (Connor McCarron) in trouble was some kind of debt, but it...

By Anna Power @TLE_Film '71 is a darkly disturbing, intensely evocative, riveting portrayal of a young soldier's experience of war, in the bitterest of conflicts, that of the Northern Ireland troubles. Jack O'Connell (Starred Up) is rapidly emerging as the actor of his generation with his elliptical, highly emotive performance as private Gary Hook, an army new recruit from small town Derbyshire. From children's home to army barracks, his first posting sees his troop rerouted to Belfast due to increasing...

By Anna Power @TLE_Film Andrei Zvyagintsev's Leviathan is a tale of rot and corruption in modern day Russia that is as brittle and barren as the skeletal Whale carcass beached on the shore of this remote northwestern Russian town. Unforgiving and relentless, the film’s darkness is offset by exquisite raucous vodka-drenched banter of the kind that provokes laughter and blushes in equal measure. A rough re-working of the Old Testament’s Book of Job, it tells the story of Kolya (Alexei...

Reviewed by Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada A village in Ethiopa, 1996. As 14 year old Hirut is walking home from school, she is kidnapped by a group of young armed men. One of the men rapes her and leaves her to sleep on the floor of his house. She has fallen victim to a tradition still observed in rural Ethiopia at the time: Men kidnap and rape girls they want to marry, overthrowing the family’s refusal to give their daughter in...

By Matt Keay @MattAdamKeay In the opening minutes of Gerard Johnson’s sophomore effort, Hyena, the audience is presented with a bravura neon-lit nighttime raid, set against foreboding music, a sense of dread permeating the screen. The men they see appear to be policeman, but they are so far removed from the friendly beat bobbies the majority of the public recognise that they could be forgiven for expecting their uniforms to be some sort of disguise; a ruse for nefarious criminal...